


Imperfect

by levitatethis



Category: Heroes - Fandom
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-05-18
Updated: 2010-05-18
Packaged: 2017-10-09 13:18:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,815
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/87909
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/levitatethis/pseuds/levitatethis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sylar reflects on what Mohinder means to him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Imperfect

**Author's Note:**

> Written for cellshader's prompt: "Jesus Christ, That's A Pretty Face, The Kind You'd Find On Someone That Could Save."

It didn’t matter how many times Sylar crossed paths with Mohinder, he always had the same thought—

_That man is going to be the end of me. _

It wasn’t as utterly tragic as it sounded. “The end” was hardly that final, its edges undefined and porous instead. It wasn’t “life and death,” although it very well could be (and was when the occasion lent itself), but more a case of “beware the life you lead.”

The first time Sylar saw Mohinder was in a photograph that Chandra showed him. He had spoken fondly of his son, a fact Sylar conveniently left out when Mohinder had a gun pointed at his head months later in a fit of vengeance. The threat of death threw politeness out the window. At that time he used harsh sounding language like “fragile” which was not a lie either. Chandra had referred to Mohinder as such but not with the distaste that Sylar took pleasure in implying. Chandra _had _said it with a certain air of sadness as if he knew he was the cause of being disconnected from his son.

In any case, the photograph captured Sylar’s undivided attention. While Chandra made tea for them, Sylar had gently fingered the edges of the picture, making certain to not leave behind any smudge marks from his fingerprints on the coloured surface. He guessed it was taken not too long ago. Mohinder stood with his mother in a courtyard and both of them were smiling broadly. Upon closer inspection Sylar realized that Mohinder was actually in the middle of laughing, with his left arm out to the side in a gesture of, ‘Take the picture already.’

Although the happiness of the two people frozen in time was obvious, based on Chandra’s reverential confessions during long afternoon chats, Sylar wondered if that was the last time the Suresh family had felt like that. Was that why Chandra kept that particular photograph? Was it a rare remembrance of his family in happier times before it had turned so abruptly and absolutely?

Mohinder was the image of innocence and Sylar ascribed a certain naivety to him. Despite considering himself to be more the son Chandra should have had, Sylar did not dislike Mohinder. Rather he was drawn to him as an object of curiosity. He felt an inexplicable kinship with him for the shared experience of not living up to a father’s expectations, or at least not being important enough for that father to stick around.

He examined the photograph very closely many times and as different as he imagined himself to be from Mohinder he also felt an uneasy bond of familiarity with him. Thankfully he could rely on the oceans and landmasses that stood between them to provide the necessary barrier to more soulful (and painful) searching.

Seeing Mohinder in the flesh was a shock to his system. Sylar should have known that murdering Chandra would breach the protective walls that had safely separated his life from Mohinder’s. It was his own doing then that brought Mohinder permanently across the divide and into his life. Standing at Zane’s front door, Sylar immediately recognized him and a flood of facts and feelings that had collected in his brain from when Chandra had spoken of his son left Sylar momentarily speechless and unnerved.

Worries of the truth and its devastating consequences forced Sylar to tread carefully, but even he had his weaknesses. How was he to know that his came in human form?

The imperfect balance was where they came to reside. Or at least Sylar regarded it as such. Getting a reading on Mohinder was always more work than it should be, a fact that bothered and intrigued him. That was how they were written from the beginning. The first time Sylar stared up at Mohinder from the tip of the gun barrel he thought the end had never looked so innocent, so angry, and so beautiful. If everything in his life had brought him to that moment it wasn’t a bad way to go. He was outplayed and outwitted.

But he was nowhere out of the game; especially one with rules that kept changing.

Mohinder was his harbinger of death in its dichotomous form. Capable of ending him (though always a few steps shy of completion) Mohinder straddled the line with cold resolve and an overdose of emotion. Battle after battle they picked the other apart, refusing to give in. Sylar became learned in the ways of being distracted into submission. With a sudden bout of super strength or not, Mohinder had power and Sylar admired the way in which he wielded it. When focused it was all encompassing and unforgiving. More times than Sylar could count he had been on the receiving end of Mohinder’s wrath. Such was the consequence of their intertwined lives.

Of course Sylar returned the favour, but he owed his creative resistance to Mohinder’s unexpected onslaught. In many ways Mohinder’s constant defiance pushed Sylar to keep up his pace and stay on his feet.

Peter might match Sylar’s every step, jump, or leap forward (and the begrudging self-admission was that he did). Matt could force his way into Sylar’s mind and try to turn him on himself. Hiro may jump through time searching for loopholes that could never be undone. Claire could break and reform at a pace that kept him constantly backtracking and pushing forward, and Bennet might rely on a battalion with nothing to lose and a sick desire to prove how far they—he—could go, but the truest challenge came in the least likely of packages, and the most troubling.

Peter served the part as Sylar’s nemesis. He was the list on paper counter agent who fulfilled expectations. He presented little challenge beyond pain-for-pain and a disturbing game of ‘anything you can do I can do better.’ Their fight was methodical.

Mohinder, on the other hand, slid into the role of arch nemesis with incredible ease. Sylar regarded their every movement around each other as a game. No action was totally innocent. Words did not exist in a vacuum. Each miniscule second of a shared look was encased in crucial significance. Every touch was deliberate. Breaking down worked from the inside out, and vice versa.

If there was any chance at a diverted path, Sylar’s guess was that it would only be found with Mohinder at his side in some capacity, friend or foe, love or war. The tone didn’t really matter. The initially off putting and then ultimately incredible revelation that rooted itself deep within Sylar’s psyche was that he could exist in two distinct yet similar forms for Mohinder. Unbeknownst to Mohinder, his very being propagated that inscrutable fact.

Against him, _because_ of him, Sylar discovered the extent of his own awe-inspiring reach. What he could be was grander, more complex, more fantastic than anything he had conjured up in one of his lonely daydreams as a child. Had he not met Mohinder he surely would have still survived the minefield that littered his surrounding life but would his reactions have been slower? Less analytical? Would he have stumbled into his own demise more readily?

Would he have known the taste of the road not taken?

It was those damn conversations that reminded him that the man in the photograph was more than a face he had assigned a personality and shared father complex with. Speaking _with_ Mohinder, even after all was said and done and anger flowed more steadily from the doctor’s stern and narrowed eyes, remembering the way they seemed to exist on the same page, with a shared approach to uncovering the genetic anomaly that had thrown them together, amidst matching concern regarding those who would use them for even darker purposes, brought back to life a part of Sylar’s past he thought he was done with.

It still happened that Sylar would catch Mohinder stealing a glance his way and where he once wrote it off as inquisitiveness and suspicion, he later amended that interpretation. It was in Mohinder’s expression of softened lines and searching eyes, open and unrevealing without the tell of crinkled corners and narrowed slits. Sylar saw it in the surprising upturn of his mouth as he fought back a smile, and the calmed demeanor he settled into when Sylar was present and just as outside of a conversation happening between Peter, Matt and Claire.

With a much needed step back, Sylar saw himself and Mohinder at the outside reaches of a tense huddle that dealt with them _without _including them. Sylar knew why they kept him at bay but could not figure out how Mohinder came to fall short of their inner sanctum. Was it a reprimand? Did they see Mohinder _with him_ the way Sylar did? Were they wisely trying to keep Sylar distracted from privileged information by using Mohinder as bait? Could it be possible that it was Mohinder’s own doing to extricate himself so that he could have uninterrupted time to drift into a contemplative state of regrets and what ifs?

The latter was a scenario Sylar came back to more often than not. That version of Mohinder became symbolic as much as it was tangible. Had Sylar met Mohinder before the current road began collecting mileage, when the future still teetered on the precarious head of a pin, there was a high probability (as close to certainty as Sylar could fathom) that Gabriel would have reached his enlightened state as he was, not as a recreated version that existed in the extreme.

Mohinder would have supported and encouraged him, been there through the journey’s struggle. Mohinder could appreciate Gabriel’s desire to be more and understood the sting of feeling stuck in a life that could barely contain his dreams. With Mohinder, Gabriel may have reached the same lofty heights he did as Sylar but without the trail of bodies and shattered lives.

It was no use dwelling on that which could not be changed, but that did not make ignoring it any easier. Sylar’s mind worked in quantifiable facts and hypotheses. One of those sordid ruminations was that he could still give it up, the parts others found repulsive, and keep the life he deserved and had earned. He erased that recurring thought with a shake of his head.

In a way, thinking about that gave him a feeling of comfort—that no matter which way his life charged forward it was his to play out as it should. Mohinder was both ‘what is’ and ‘what could have been.’ He was Sylar’s reshaped timeline as concurrent presents and a future untold but certain and deliberate.

Mohinder was his unwitting savior in penetrable flesh and flawed mind. In his face Sylar saw misplaced hope and a distorted mirror image. He saw how they were always meant to be—

Together. Imperfect.

Forever.   
 


End file.
